How He Won

How did Mamdani pull off one of the most improbable upsets in modern American politics? Pundits have tied themselves into knots since the primary win to downplay the political significance of this race, searching to highlight any takeaway other than the most obvious one: Zohran was an authentic voice for a platform that spoke to working-class anger at a broken status quo.

Yes, it’s true that Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams were flawed candidates. And yes, it’s true that Mamdani is charismatic and his team brilliantly leveraged social media. But the dynamism of this campaign can’t be separated from its politics.

Nor was the content of Mamdani’s campaign reducible to only talking about kitchen-table issues — a strategy that centrist Democratic consultants are now peddling as a panacea for the party’s ills. Yes, his focus was on bringing down the cost of living for working people. But Mamdani cut through the noise by relentlessly focusing on three unusually ambitious plans  — free childcare, fast and free buses, frozen rent — to make New York affordable via governmental action, not free-market incentives. And crucially, he insisted that all this would be paid for by taxing the rich. Clintonism this was not.

No less important, Zohran was a credible messenger for this transformative vision because he wasn’t beholden to corporate cash or part of a decrepit Democratic establishment. The fact that Mamdani is a democratic socialist, and that he refused to throw Palestinians under the bus, signaled his authentic, outsider status to millions of New Yorkers who are used to mainstream politicians saying one thing and doing another.

Like Bernie Sanders before him — and very much unlike candidates like Kamala Harris — when Zohran talked about workers versus the billionaires, you knew he meant it. It was on the basis of that credibility that Zohran, with the help of countless Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) activists, built an unprecedented canvassing machine of well over 90,000 volunteers. You can’t have Zohranism without Zohran’s politics.

His excellently run campaign was a necessary condition for victory, but it couldn’t have gotten nearly this far had it not coincided with seismic popular opinion shifts. Zohran achieved what Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns envisioned but never quite managed to do: dramatically remake the electorate by inspiring new (mostly young) voters while also winning over large numbers of traditional Democrats disenchanted with the party establishment.

Wearing a Zohran pin or shirt over the last few months has been a surefire way to get a constant stream of thumbs up or cheers from complete strangers all across the city. Zohran not only dominated among college-educated millennials and Zoomers in the “Commie Corridor,” he also won in [[[[[LIST]]]]], working-class black and brown neighborhoods that saw huge swings toward Trump in 2024. And he dominated among the older, liberal middle-class “wine mom” demographics — crucial parts of the Democratic base that have radicalized in the face of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’s inability to put up a serious fight against Trump. [[MAKE SURE THIS IS TRUE ONCE THE RESULTS COME IN]]

Tonight’s blowout [[CHECK]] shows that young people and large numbers of workers are fed up with business as usual and looking for an alternative. Nevertheless, establishment figures on both sides of the aisle will surely dismiss today’s results as a deep-blue city outlier that is unreplicable because electorates elsewhere are more moderate. But three out of New York’s last four mayors (Eric Adams, Michael Bloomberg, and Rudy Giuliani) were hardly progressives. And this argument wrongly assumes that most Americans have coherent policy preferences and neatly fit on a very conservative to very liberal axis. Americans are feeling the pinch everywhere, and overcoming MAGA requires us to point that anger upward — against corporate America — so that it doesn’t instead get channeled downward against immigrants and trans kids.

As research by the Center for Working-Class Politics shows, our best bet to electorally defeat Trumpism is the same in all corners of the country: economic populist campaigns around authentically anti-elite candidates. This might mean running as independents in parts of the country where the Democratic brand is toxic. And in red states like Nebraska, a blue-collar job or track record of union militancy may be a more effective anti-elite signal than a DSA membership card. But if the form taken by economic populism may differ by region, the fundamental political message will be the same: working-class people deserve economic security and dignity, and that’s why it’s time to make the billionaires pay. Tonight’s victory is sure to spark countless new efforts along these lines all across the country.

Get in the Fight

Because working-class politics has so much potential to displace Democratic centrism and Republican authoritarianism, a successful Mamdani administration poses a serious threat to establishment leaders in both parties, to say nothing of hysterical billionaires who see even modest tax hikes as the advent of communism. We should expect elites, starting with President Trump, to do everything possible to stop Zohran from implementing his agenda.

Electing a fighter to city hall is not enough to turn things around against such powerful opponents. Huge numbers of everyday people in the city and across the state have to get in the fight after tonight.

The fact that establishment politicians like Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Mamdani testifies to the strength of the movement behind him. But our veto-holding governor’s continued refusal to support taxing the rich illustrates just how far we still have to go. To push Hochul and other establishment politicians to fund transformative reforms  — and to keep up Zohran’s popularity in the face of inevitable attacks and crises — that movement needs to grow wider and deeper.

After victories like tonight’s, it’s easy to overestimate the Left’s strength. But it’s clear the Democratic establishment’s decay has created space for left electoral influence to skyrocket well beyond our organized strength in working-class neighborhoods and workplaces. Most New Yorkers are not members of unions, most union members are not active, and much of the broader progressive ecosystem remains siloed into small, staff-driven nonprofits. And while it is great news that New York City DSA has grown to over 11,300 members, this is still a fraction of the campaign’s almost one hundred thousand canvassers and an even smaller fraction of the [[[[NUMBER]]]] who voted for Mamdani.

This imbalance between the Left’s electoral and nonelectoral strength is a relatively new phenomenon. In contrast, Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” won over the leadership of organized labor more than a decade before they won the mayor’s office in 1910 — an office they effectively wielded for most of the next fifty years. And New York’s greatest mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was able to push through such an ambitious populist agenda, and help lift our city out of the Depression, in part because he was backed by a vibrantly growing union movement in the 1930s.

The task ahead is to lean on the momentum of tonight’s victory, plus levers of city hall and the reach of Zohran’s massive platform, to reverse engineer a working-class movement powerful enough to transform New York. Many will do this by joining DSA, others by unionizing their workplaces — some by both.

Most urgently of all, huge numbers of New Yorkers need to plug into big, united-front fightbacks to win free childcare, affordable housing, and free buses by taxing the rich — and to protect our undocumented neighbors from Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutality through nonviolent mass disruption like high-school walkouts. Changing the relationship of forces through outward-facing organizing will do far more to help make Zohran’s platform a reality than endless leftist criticisms of the administration’s inevitable limitations and compromises.

Nobody can predict what lies ahead. Trump is escalating his power grab nationwide, and billionaires in New York are not going to easily cede their power or profits. We are sure to confront all sorts of crises and setbacks over the months and years ahead.

Mamdani’s stunning victory has nevertheless provided working people and the Left with a strong shot of raised expectations, in a period when fear and resignation are otherwise the norm. This is no small thing. As Milwaukee sewer socialist Victor Berger noted in 1907, “Despair is the chief opponent of progress. Our greatest need is hope.”

Tonight’s victory should inspire us all to organize harder than ever before for the city — and the world — that we know is possible. Like Zohran today, Berger understood that “the earth is large enough and wide enough to supply all the good things of life to every human being born on it. . . . [But] in order to get a better world we shall have to work for it and fight for it.” That battle has only just begun.